Feb 2007

Kickingbear Blog: “Indie Mac Shop has, likely, one maybe two programmers and some contact with a part time artist who may well be on contract. Perhaps they may do the artwork themselves, taking time away from their coding. Either way art, in the indie dev world, is harder to come by than code.” (Via Gus Mueller.)

Manton Reece: “In the tradition of other independent Mac developers such as Mike Zornek, Daniel Jalkut, and Gus Mueller, I’m going to share some sales information from the first 75 days of Wii Transfer.”

Matt Neuburg, MacDevCenter.com: “I’ll explain how to download and install rb-appscript. I’ll discuss the basics of rb-appscript usage and show how to develop a simple ‘hello world’ script. Finally, I’ll rewrite the Ruby-AppleScript example from my book to use Ruby with rb-appscript instead.”

Red Sweater Blog: “How am I going to reward users for their enthusiasm? By releasing updates. With fixes. And features. And stuff. It’s been four days since the acquisition, and I’m happy to announce the immediate availability of MarsEdit 1.1.3, a free update for all registered users.”

bbum: “C has always been in the role of the ‘fallback for performance reasons’ solution as soon as developers started writing significant bodies of code in other languages... Even the scripting languages all have supported dynamic loading from the beginning that has always been used for both accessing native functionality and for implementing ‘performance critical’ stuff in native C.”

We just posted a sneak-peek release of NetNewsWire 3 today. It’s not even a beta yet, and it has bugs, unfinished features, unstarted features, and it still needs more polish and testing. All that said, you can download it from the beta page. ;)

The change notes page lists what’s new since 2.1.1. Highlights include Spotlight searching, new Combined View, feed ‘cover art’, full screen mode, Growl notifications, tabs with thumbnails and animations, the ability to choose a folder when subscribing, hiding/showing the subscriptions list, and lots more.

I’ll be writing more about it on inessential.com. Here’s the initial post and here’s a post on a hidden pref for a monochrome toolbar.

Giles Turnbull, O’Reilly Mac DevCenter Blog: “So I created my own Applications folder, inside my user directory, and in there I put all the apps I downloaded and installed by myself. I thought I was taking control, but after a while I realised the folly of this approach.”

waffle software: “Monocle is a simple search tool that puts a universal search field at your disposal. When you want search, you can choose from a number of engines to perform the search in different places. Monocle comes preloaded with engines for Google, Wikipedia, Windows Live Search and Yahoo! Search. You can easily add your own engines by performing an example search inside a web browser window in Monocle.”

Wolf: “Much to my surprise, my favorite NetNewsWire style is Spotlight... Since I’ve been happy with the Spotlight style for so long, and it looks like this relationship is a long-term one, I decided to put some time into enhancing it a mite: Spotlight+wrap.nnwstyle.”

Nick Bradbury: “A pipe takes input from different sources, mixes them together based on criteria you specify, then outputs the results as a single RSS feed. In this example, I created a pipe named ‘YouTunes’ which links the top 10 songs from iTunes with videos from YouTube.”

Surfin’ Safari: “After many discussions with interested parties and members of the WebKit community, we’ve decided the time has come to get serious about stabilizing the code. We’ve had about two years of development, which has included many awesome compatibility fixes, performance improvements, standards compliance enhancements, and new features. Now is the time to get the source tree in solid shape.” (Via email from Justin Williams.)

Macworld: Editors’ Notes: “Steve Jobs may not be exactly reticent, but neither would I call him randomly demonstrative. Rarely do you see him respond to criticisms of Apple, except in the context of interview sound bites. For him to, say, author an open letter on the state of Digital Rights Management is, if not unprecedented, at least very very rare.”

Dan Wood: “Essentially what I thought I’d do is to see how a particular method invocation grew memory over repeated use. That way, leaks would be easy to spot with ObjectAlloc (or probably with OmniObjectMeter).”

Good tip: I’m sure I’ll use it. Here in the lab we use a combination of ‘leaks’ (with stack logging turned on), ObjectAlloc, and MallocDebug.

Daring Fireball on Bill Gates, who says: “Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.”

Rixstep: “The Unix sudo provides privilege escalation. Using sudo is far better than enabling the root account. But there are still dangers. Equipped with a bit of social engineering savvy and a clever script a black hat can toast your machine.”

Daring Fireball: “It’s not every day that one of the most popular indie Mac apps in history changes hands, but that’s what happened today, when Matthew Drayton and his new company, Nolobe, acquired the rights to Interarchy from Peter N Lewis’s Stairways Software.”